"Of All The Gin Joints"
Contributed by on Feb 20, 2015
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By Peter Bonventre for Five O' Clock Magazine
“I should never have switched from scotch to martinis.”
Those were Humphrey Bogart’s last words as he lay dying of esophageal cancer. I came upon them in the terrific Of All the Gin Joints: Stumbling Through Hollywood History, written by Mark Bailey and illustrated by Edward Hemingway. If you’re looking for the perfect stocking stuffer, look no further—this heady volume is sure to leave even casual movie fans giddier than a tall glass of rum-spiked eggnog.
Of All the Gin Joints —need I note the title comes from a thin slice of Bogie’s dialogue in Casablanca?—is an intoxicating brew of quotes, anecdotes, recipes, pithy bios, and witty illustrations. Many of the actors and directors in these pages, it seems, favored either gin or vodka, and to steal a phrase from Truman Capote, not a few of them were “half-drunk all day and dead-drunk all night” when filming on location.
Some stars weren’t merely functioning alcoholics; they were world-class dipsos who guzzled inconceivable amounts of booze. Like William Holden, who routinely threw back two shots of whiskey before a scene, and Errol Flynn, who was buried with six bottles of whiskey in his casket. And then there was Spencer Tracy, whose drinking binges bordered on insanity.
Want more? You know you do:
* Ava Gardner “liked to get hammered and hammered fast.” Her drink of choice was a concoction she called Mommy’s Little Mixture. The recipe: Dump every kind of liquor you can find into a pitcher and then drain it down.
* Steve McQueen drank Old Milwaukee beer by the case.
* Dean Martin: “You’re not too drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”
* One night, on location in Marfa, Texas, while filming Giant, Rock Hudson and Liz Taylor added chocolate liqueur and chocolate syrup to their vodka martinis, thus creating the chocolate martini.
* John Wayne: “Tequila makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head.”
* By all accounts, Richard Burton’s drinking ability was miraculous. At his peak, he consumed three bottles of vodka a day, and once proclaimed, “If you can’t do Hamlet straight through with a hangover, you ought to get right off the damn stage.”
* While filming Becket, Burton and co-star Peter O’Toole were perpetually wasted during the five-month shoot in England. O’Toole tried mightily to match the Welshman’s prowess, but fell short. O’Toole’s limit was “only” two bottles of vodka a day. Burton later described O’Toole’s performance in one scene, where his character, King Henry, puts a ring on Becket’s finger, as a man threading “a needle wearing boxing gloves.”
* James Coburn said of director Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch): “He was a genius for four hours a day. The rest of the time he was drunk.”
* And for a few final words, here’s the great noir novelist and screenwriter Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity): “Anyone who doesn’t like Hollywood is either crazy or sober.”
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Illustration by Tim Lahan.
